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Silly question, but are these numbers like Nielsen ratings? If so, are they taken from the total number of TV owners or only the people who were watching TV at the time of airing? The first page of the thread didn't seem to explain much.

These are household ratings. The denominator is the total of all Japanese households that own a television. So a rating of one means that in one percent of the households at least one television in those households was tuned to that program. I believe Nielsen has a six-minute minimum before a program is considered to be viewed; I don't know if the Japanese rating agency has a similar minimum.

Public Opinion Research Division of the NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute
conducts a national audience rating survey in June and November every year. Each of these
surveys covers 3,600 people aged 7 and above, selected by stratified random sampling
method from throughout Japan. The selected persons are asked to record their TV viewing
and radio listening behavior at five-minute intervals during a 24-hour day in diary-style over
one week.
In 2011, this survey was conducted from the 6th through the 12th of June. The number
of valid respondents was 2,554 persons (70.9%). An audience rating of 1% was estimated to
correspond to approximately 1 million and 180 thousands viewers.
This audience rating survey is a regular, continuous evaluation that has been
conducted over many years, employing the same method, the same surveying format and the
same contents. This report summarizes the results of the June 2011 survey.

NHK has always maintained its own ratings system and has used "qualitative" ratings for years as well. However the ratings commercial broadcasters use come from Video Research, a Dentsu subsidiary. VR maintains a panel of metered households the same way Nielsen does. There used to be a fairly detailed document about their methods which I linked to in an earlier posting in this thread, but it has vanished from the VR website.

You'll notice the NHK surveys only happen twice a year, so they clearly cannot be the source of the weekly ratings reported in this thread. I'm pretty sure the VR ratings refer to households, though they also provide demographic breakouts to their customers because they use "people meters." These meters have buttons representing the various family members. The members of the metered household are supposed to press their buttons to record their presence when they are watching the TV. You'll see some of the demographic breakouts in some earlier postings in this thread.